Hello everyone! 2018 was a difficult year for everyone involved in the crypto space. Investors suffered because they lost money. However, I think it was much more difficult for developers, as they invested both money and time on their projects. Recently, there is a project which is undergoing lots of FUD. That project is called ["Haven Protocol"](https://www.havenprotocol.com/) not to be confused with Havven, which is a stablecoin project recently renamed to [Synthetix](https://www.synthetix.io/).

---

## What is Haven Protocol?

<center>![image.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmTqwocFHMNyc6gwYKdKaxC8cHZKBXEMqUMQQyt8QN5zUe)</center>

Haven Protocol is a fork from Monero. **It aims to be a offshore and private multi-currency bank account which is able retain value in terms of the corresponding fiat currency "deposited"**. In traditional banking, it is costly to maintain a multi-currency bank account. Not only you need a minimum bank account balance, the exchange rate is likely not to your advantage. In fact, most banks do not readily offer a multi-currency account for their clients. Haven aims to achieve that and allows such "multi-currency banking facility" to be available to everyone. The official description of the project is as follows,

>Haven is a digital wallet that can be seen as a free private multicurrency offshore bank account. Haven allows you to store & transact money securely, anonymously & untraceably while it retains it's value in the currency (e.g. US Dollar) you want. Haven is decentralized which means it requires no trusted third parties and no central bank to store & transact money.

Overall, this sounds like a good idea. However, the "mint and burn" method to retain value against fiat sounds only good on paper to me. In practice, I believe it is probably unable to "mint and burn" that easily. The whitepaper is a little scant on details of how that can be achieved and hence, I did not follow the project any further.

---

## Here comes the FUD

A few days back, the following post surfaced in Haven Protocol's Discord server.

<center>![haven-dev.png](https://www.thecryptoupdates.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Haven-Dev.png)</center>

As shown in their website, "Haven Dev" is the main developer of the project and he has apparently gone dark for weeks. Being the only person with access to the project's code, heavy responsibilities are resting on one person. If this guy is not going to hand over the codes, then a lot of time will be wasted to rework the project. When that happen, the worst possible scenario is that the project gets abandoned and making the cryptocurrency worthless.

<center>![image.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/Qmaf8ootLsLMA1D2qPBSh8ERMRp595jgvhgPvGjkjvbcCY)</center>
*"Haven Dev" is one of the 2 main developers*

In a later update, "Haven Dev" replied in Discord with the following message,
>“Haven development has been ongoing… in light of the insane amount of FUD…I will prepare [the code] and hand it all to the team so that they can hire new devs to work on it.”

With this recent update, investors' confidence was somewhat restored and there is a bounce in price as shown in the price chart.

<center>![image.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmZZuKJwsQsyRQiAhVLGZ2UV3kenuSUTQfdYT8Au4MKyJt)</center>

One thing which baffles me is how "Haven Dev" managed to have sole access to the codes when the project is supposed to be open-sourced. 

---

## Conclusion

While there are many people on Twitter starting to call this an "exit scam", I beg to differ. First, there is no conclusive evidence that "Haven Dev" has control over substantial amount of coins. He only has access to the codes, which by itself do not provide much financial incentive for an exit scam. Next, Haven Protocol is a fully community-funded project. There was no ICO conducted and hence, there is no funds to be siphoned. 

I think this is yet another case of the infrastructure being decentralized but the project development is centralized. The fact that it is centralized on a single person made it far worse. In security terms, we call it a "single-man risk". Basically, too much power and control is concentrated on a single person resulting in tremendous risk. I think it is a case where 1 developer lost interest in the project. Incidentally, this developer holds the key to the project development.

A similar incident happend to [Oyster Protocol about 3 months back](https://www.steempeak.com/cryptocurrency/@culgin/what-is-going-on-with-oyster-protocol), where the lead developer left a backdoor in the smart contract to mint more tokens. This in turn diluted the token value and some of the tokens were successfully sold on Kucoin. That was truly an exit scam but it was also a result of "single-man risk".

I hope Haven Protocol is able to bounce back from this setback and get the developers they need to complete the project. I think it is a powerful concept to allow everyone access to an offshore multi-currency banking facility. The key thing is not to repeat the same mistake. What do you think about this incident? Are you affected by this in any ways? Thanks for reading!


---
<center>View this post on [Steeve](https://www.steeve.app/@culgin/what-is-going-on-with-haven-protocol), an AI-powered Steem interface</center>